Planning a Wedding Cake Consultation

People arrive at a cake consultation expecting a tasting. There is tasting, and it is the enjoyable part, but it is not where the decisions get made. Most of what matters is settled in the twenty minutes before anybody picks up a fork, and couples who have thought about those things in advance get far more out of the hour.

When to book

Earlier than feels necessary. Six to nine months before the wedding is comfortable. Three months is workable. Under six weeks and the conversation narrows to what is possible rather than what you want.

The reason is not that a cake takes months to make. It does not. It is that the cake depends on decisions you may not have made yet, and making them under time pressure produces worse answers.

Book after you have the venue and the date, and after you have some idea of numbers. Before that there is not enough to work with.

What to settle before you come

How many people, and are they all having cake. These are different numbers. If the cake is dessert, everyone eats. If it comes out late in the evening alongside other things, half do, and a good deal goes home in napkins.

When it gets cut. A cake cut at four in the afternoon and a cake cut at ten at night are different cakes. Late evening cake is eaten by fewer people, in smaller pieces, by people who have had dinner. It should be lighter and there should be less of it than you think.

Where it will stand, and for how long. A cake sitting in a marquee in July is a different engineering problem from one on a table in a cool room. Buttercream in direct sun does what you would expect. Tell us the venue and the month and it changes what we suggest.

Who is setting it up. Somebody has to receive it, put it where it goes and, if it is tiered, assemble it. Find out whether the venue does this or whether it falls to a member of your family in formal clothes an hour before the ceremony.

Whether anyone has a real dietary requirement. Not a preference, an actual one. This is much easier to design around than to bolt on.

What happens at the consultation

We do these in Belgravia by appointment. It takes about an hour.

The first part is questions, along the lines above. It is not a formality. The answers rule things in and out quickly, and it is better to discover in the first ten minutes that an outdoor August wedding rules out a particular finish than to discover it after you have fallen in love with it.

The second part is tasting. Cakes rather than tiny squares, so you can tell what the texture actually does. Medovik, Napoleon, Kyiv, Prague, Esterházy, Cipriani and the others depending on what has survived the first conversation.

Bring your phone with pictures on it. Not so we can copy someone else's cake, but because what people mean by simple, classic or modern varies enormously, and three photographs settle in a moment what ten minutes of description does not.

The third part is numbers. Portion counts, tiers, price, delivery, timings, and what has to be confirmed by when.

Things worth knowing before you decide

Big cakes are not small cakes scaled up. A sponge that works at 18 cm behaves differently at 30 cm. Bake times change, structure changes, and some recipes simply do not go up. Medovik and Napoleon scale well because they are built from thin layers. Anything relying on a light aerated crumb gets harder as it grows.

Tiers are structural, not just visual. Every tier above the first needs support hidden inside the one below. That is fine and normal, and it means the cake is assembled at the venue rather than delivered whole.

Portion sizes for weddings are smaller than you think. Wedding portions are conventionally cut at about 2.5 cm square, considerably smaller than a dessert slice. A cake that looks as though it feeds thirty will often be counted as feeding sixty.

Two flavours across two tiers is usually right. More than that and it becomes a logistics problem at the point of cutting. Less and you lose the chance to cover different tastes.

The cutting cake and the eating cake can be different. A decorated tier for the photographs and a plain sheet cake in the kitchen for the actual serving is a normal, sensible arrangement and it costs less.

The Eastern European question

We are asked fairly often for a medovik wedding cake, usually where one side of the family is Russian, Ukrainian or Polish, and it is a lovely thing to do.

It works well. Medovik is structurally excellent at scale because it is many thin firm layers, it improves after a night, and it is not too sweet, which matters when people are eating it at the end of a long day. It looks quite different from a conventional iced wedding cake, which is either the point or a problem depending on your family.

The Esterházy also scales, and it solves gluten for the whole room at once rather than for one table.

What we will ask that you may not expect

Whether there are children at the wedding, because that changes the second flavour more than anything else does.

Whether the cake is being kept for an anniversary. The tradition of saving the top tier is alive and well, and a cake meant to survive a year in a freezer has to be built for it. Fresh cream and fresh fruit rule it out entirely.

And whether anyone in either family has strong expectations about what a wedding cake is. This sounds like a strange question and it has saved several couples a difficult conversation, because a medovik is a beautiful wedding cake and it is not what a certain kind of relative is picturing.

Booking

Send us a message with your date, your venue and rough numbers and we will arrange a time. Consultations are in Belgravia, by appointment only, and we do not do them at short notice.

For anything smaller, a birthday, a christening or a party under about twenty five people, you do not need a consultation. The website covers it, with 48 hours notice and delivery across London and Surrey at £12 within SW3 and £15 elsewhere.